I, for one, am excited. 3,462 days ago a rocket was launched carrying the New Horizons spacecraft. Its mission was to conduct the first ever flyby of the planet Pluto. Yes, that's right, the planet pluto. Back then it was still a planet but as every 8 year old but few 38 year olds know Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006 and we now have a solar system with 8 planets in it. The problem was that we started to find a lot of other objects out there that were about the same size as Pluto so, if we were going to keep pluto, then we would have to make room for these other objects too and very soon we might have a solar system with a couple of dozen planets in it. Good luck getting the 8 years olds to memorise all those.
Anyhoo, Pluto being so very small (only a couple of thousand kilometres across) and receiving only about one thousandth of the sunlight we enjoy it is quite difficult to see. Even when we point the mighty Hubble space telescope at it we fail to get images with any great detail in them. The image on the right was the best we had until new Horizons started edging closer in the last few weeks.
Then last weekend, at a distance of about 1 million miles from Pluto, the image below was beamed back from 3 billion miles away. The increase in resolution is marked and will have the Geology, Geophysics and Imaging nerds at John Hopkins university very excited; as it will all of us interested in going boldly where no one has ever gone before. And the best part? It's only going to get better. The craft will pass within 8,000 miles of the planet's surface today and, asides, from all the cool science that will be done, should take some pretty awesome pictures before speeding off into the outer solar system at 50,000 miles per hour.
Anyhoo, Pluto being so very small (only a couple of thousand kilometres across) and receiving only about one thousandth of the sunlight we enjoy it is quite difficult to see. Even when we point the mighty Hubble space telescope at it we fail to get images with any great detail in them. The image on the right was the best we had until new Horizons started edging closer in the last few weeks.
Then last weekend, at a distance of about 1 million miles from Pluto, the image below was beamed back from 3 billion miles away. The increase in resolution is marked and will have the Geology, Geophysics and Imaging nerds at John Hopkins university very excited; as it will all of us interested in going boldly where no one has ever gone before. And the best part? It's only going to get better. The craft will pass within 8,000 miles of the planet's surface today and, asides, from all the cool science that will be done, should take some pretty awesome pictures before speeding off into the outer solar system at 50,000 miles per hour.
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| Images courtesy of NASA |
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